While this sounds like a worthy goal, the bill features a repressive data retention requirement that would open ordinary Americans to abuse from government as well as cyber-criminals. Specifically, the bill requires that the temporary IP address of users of commercial ISP access be retained along with identifying information for 18 months.

Here’s a quick primer on how your computer gets on the internet with the average commercial ISP:

1. You plug the phone line/TV cable into this modem.
2. The modem establishes a connection with the ISP through the phone line/TV cable.
3. The modem is assigned an IP address (e.g. 71.119.121.143)
4. You hook a computer or a router into the modem.
5. This computer or router is assigned an IP address (either 192.168.xxx.xxx or 10.xxx.xxx.xxx)
6. If you hooked up a router, then the computers hooked to it will be assigned IP addresses by the router.

The important thing here is that only the IP address of the modem is visible to the ISP. There could be one, five, or fifty computers sitting behind that modem, but to the ISP all that traffic would be coming from a single IP.

Let’s look now at a couple of cases in which child pornography might be requested by a machine behind an IP without the ISP customer’s knowledge:

1. The WiFi Stealer: The customer is running a poorly-secured wireless access point. A neighbor looking to download child porn cracks the security and uses the access point to download the material.
2. The Virus: A computer virus makes it on to one of the customer’s machines. It is programmed to fetch data from child porn websites and relay it to the virus creator.

Note that in both cases, the customer of the ISP and those living in his household wouldn’t even know their connection had been used to download child porn until they got the knock on the door. Aside from the thousands of families each year whose lives would be disrupted by purely mistaken prosecutions, setting this standard in law would make it possible to deliberately set people up to undergo a time-consuming and costly legal battle.

If that weren’t bad enough, the requirement to retain “identifying account data” is troublesome as well. What could be so bad about keeping the name of the customer for 18 months? Nothing, except keeping the name alone won’t do what the bill wants. As someone who’s designed software to match identities, I can say with certainty that in practice this requirement would force retention, at a minimum, of customer name, address, and date of birth. Most ISPs would probably go farther and retain a unique ID number such as a Social Security Number or a financial ID number such as a credit/debit card number or checking account number.

But wait a minute, you say. Don’t ISPs already have all this?

Yes, they do. Today, they are not required to relate the assigned IP addresses for the last 18 months to it. This requires storing the customer data in such a way that it can be related to the IP addresses, as well as being recalled later for use by law enforcement.

The simple fact of making it usable for law enforcement makes it less secure. The logs have to be linked to the customer accounts, meaning that the data is likely exposed to the internet. All the data has to be recalled as plain text, meaning that weaker encryption practices must be used. Even if everything is done perfectly right, an interface must be built to get the data out and to law enforcement, meaning that a bad actor inside an ISP has a ready-made portal to all sorts of personally-identifiable information.

Sounds pretty bad, right? It’s worse than you think. Corporate records are not subject to the same Fourth Amendment protections as individual records. Currently, to find out everything an ISP user is doing, law enforcement needs to prove its case and get a warrant. Under this bill, your internet activity would be pre-existing corporate records. No more warrants. Government wants to find out about your IP address, they subpoena the ISP for that record and they get information about you without having to prove a thing.

This bill is bad, folks. We need each of our readers to step up and contact your Representative and encourage them to say NO to this bill that treats all internet users as criminals.

• The nation’s nuclear arsenal is no longer being watched or maintained
• The doors of federal prisons have been thrown open, because none of the guards will work without being paid, and the vendors will not deliver food, medical supplies, electricity,etc.
• The border control stations are entirely unmanned, so anyone who can buy a plane ticket, or stroll across the Mexican border, is entering the country. All the illegal immigrants currently in detention are released, since we don’t have the money to put them on a plane, and we cannot actually simply leave them in a cell without electricity, sanitation, or food to see what happens.
• All of our troops stationed abroad quickly run out of electricity or fuel. Many of them are sitting in a desert with billions worth of equipment, and no way to get themselves or their equipment back to the US.
• Our embassies are no longer operating, which will make things difficult for foreign travellers
• No federal emergency assistance, or help fighting things like wildfires or floods. Sorry, tornado people! Sorry, wildfire victims! Try to live in the northeast next time!
• Housing projects shut down, and Section 8 vouchers are not paid. Families hit the streets.
• The money your local school district was expecting at the October 1 commencement of the 2012 fiscal year does not materialize, making it unclear who’s going to be teaching your kids without a special property tax assessment.
• The market for guaranteed student loans plunges into chaos. Hope your kid wasn’t going to college this year!
• The mortgage market evaporates. Hope you didn’t need to buy or sell a house!
• The FDIC and the PBGC suddenly don’t have a government backstop for their funds, which has all sorts of interesting implications for your bank account.
• The TSA shuts down. Yay! But don’t worry about terrorist attacks, you TSA-lovers, because air traffic control shut down too. Hope you don’t have a vacation planned in August, much less any work travel.
• Unemployment money is no longer going to the states, which means that pretty so, it won’t be going to the unemployed people.

Now, how many of the companies that leftists were screaming were “too big to fail” could have had one one-hundredth the impact of a Federal Government failure? Yet these same leftists who recognize too big to fail as a bad thing want to endow the Federal Government with ever more power. Amazing.

Well, everyone around Paul Krugman seems to be misinformed:

Well, here’s a little secret: most voters don’t sit around reading Clive Crook columns or debating the Bowles-Simpson plan. They have a gut sense — things are getting better or they’re getting worse — and mainly vote on that basis. They’re not paying attention at all to this stuff.

Well, alright, not everyone. Just the vast majority of voters. Unfortunately for Krugman, this statement reveals something about him rather than the voters. Krugman is the one who is out of touch with reality.

How can that be? Isn’t Krugman formulating his ideas based on massive amounts of economic data? Kind of. He has access to more economic statistics than do most of us, but in aggregate “most voters” by far have the upper hand. Every voter has a checkbook to balance and ends that need to meet. Every voter gets to experience the economy first hand. In contrast, all Krugman has is a position that shields him from economic hardship and a glut of statistics.

Krugman lives in a statistical reality. People around him could be losing their jobs left and right, but as long as unemployment remained flat, Krugman would insist that there is no employment crisis. He could suddenly find his dollars not stretching as far, but as long as core inflation remained flat, Krugman would insist that there is no inflation. He could see small businesses closing left and right, but as long as the calculated regulatory burden upon them remained the same, Krugman would claim that they’re not over-regulated.

Now, checking one’s personal reality against the statistics is not necessarily a bad thing. In the first case, one might see people losing their jobs left and right when a factory closes down. Doesn’t mean there is a broader employment crisis. In the second, there could be local factors raising prices. In the third, it could be any number of local or temporary things hurting small businesses.

The problem comes when the statistics are at odds with the reality experienced by the vast majority of people. A reasonable person in that case would begin to question the statistics. Krugman, an academic at heart and a political hack by trade, bitterly clings to the statistics in the face of reality. The statistics tell him a story that he wants to believe: interventionist government is good for the economy. That is Paul Krugman’s statistical reality.

The reality of the current economy is pretty clear. Things are bad and getting worse. The only people to whom the bad news is unexpected are academics, journalists, and politicians. Krugman, arguably all three at once these days, desperately wants to believe that his statistical reality is the true one — so desperately, in fact, that he will insist that the experiences of millions of Americans are invalid and that the conclusions they draw from them are mere “gut instinct”.

Sorry Paul, when everyone around you seems misinformed, it’s probably you.

For 10 years after leaving office, each elected official shall pay the highest income tax rate for which he cast a “yes” vote. Same goes for a president signing a tax rate into law.

If Nancy Pelosi cast a vote to raise the top income tax bracket to 75%, *she* would pay 75%. If Harry Reid voted for a top tax bracket of 55%, *he* would pay 55%.

Why should we allow our legislators to demand sacrifices of innocent citizens that they are not willing to make themselves?

That’s why Medicare needs the Independent Payment Advisory Board. Setting a cap on spending is the first step of rationing. The next is deciding who gets what medical care.

“Limited resources require decisions about who will have access to care and the extent of their coverage.” (Berwick, 1999)

As physician-blogger Dr. Richard Fogoros puts it: we can either ration overtly or covertly (“with our eyes open” or closed) — but ration we must.

The only problem with this is that a national central planner (or committee) can have their eyes wide open, yet will still be totally blind. No matter how hard you look, you can’t see a building that’s 3,000 miles away with the naked eye, can you? Centralized planners face the inevitable limitation of vision imposed by distance and the human being’s limited ability to comprehend information.

Technology increases the distance the planners can see, and allows them to comprehend more of what they see. But, contrary to the belief of the planners themselves, they’re still essentially blind. What the planners call careful, scientific decision-making I call groping blindly for solutions based on assumptions and personal preferences.

The fundamental truth forseeing the failure of Obamacare is that only individuals can ration well for themselves. Whatever centralized planners do, it’s with eyes wide shut.

The political problem for the GOP committee chairmen is that the 2005 Real ID Act has proven to be anything but popular: legislatures of two dozen states have voted to reject its requirements, and in the Michigan and Pennsylvania legislatures one chamber has done so.

That didn’t stop the House Republicans from saying in a letter this week to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that “any further extension of Real ID threatens the security of the United States.” Unless Homeland Security grants an extension, the law’s requirements take effect on May 11.

Hopefully this comes to a head, and hopefully the Republicans pushing this get an education in federalism. It’s going to come in mighty handy in resisting Obamacare.

That’s your problem. You’re an entrepreneur, so you don’t work. You don’t know what work is until you get into an educational area.

Warren over at Coyote Blog replies:

Yep, some day I will have to stop loafing around and take on a brutal assistant principal job somewhere. All I have to worry about is that every dollar I own (and more) is invested in my business and could disappear at any time if I make a mistake

Now, as an IT professional, my viewpoint on hard work is a little more extreme than most. Fifty hours, the point at which every teacher at that protest would be complaining bitterly, is a moderate week for me. My worst work week topped out at just under 100 hours. To put that number in perspective, remember that a week is only 168 hours long. My worst continuous stretch was 42 hours straight of emergency work. Why work so hard? Because I’ve got customers who are impacted if things aren’t working. Because development delays can cost companies thousands of dollars a day.

Compare that to the life of a teacher, and that’s pretty damned rough. Compare that to truly high-stress, high-demand professions, and it’s not that bad. I wouldn’t trade places with a power company lineman who has to labor under potentially-lethal conditions and extreme pressure to get people’s power back on in an emergency. Nor would I trade places with an ER doctor or nurse who works long hours tending to sick and shattered people. Nor would I trade places with a harbor pilot or air traffic controller, who run the risk of causing massive damage with a moment of inattention.

Millions of people in this country do jobs that make teaching look like a cakewalk. Now, in a perfect world, that quote from a teacher wouldn’t cause someone like me the least bit of offense. But it’s an imperfect world where this teacher is using completely unjustified self-righteousness as a weapon to stifle debate on the issue of public sector compensation. I find that offensive.

So where are the angry crowds, the demonstrations, sit-ins and unruly mobs?

[...]

Second, before people can mobilize for collective action, they have to develop a proud and angry identity and a set of claims that go with that identity. They have to go from being hurt and ashamed to being angry and indignant.

[...]

Third, protesters need targets, preferably local and accessible ones capable of making some kind of response to angry demands.

[...]

An effective movement of the unemployed will have to look something like the strikes and riots that have spread across Greece in response to the austerity measures forced on the Greek government by the European Union, or like the student protests that recently spread with lightning speed across England in response to the prospect of greatly increased school fees.

Piven is calling for the types of protests where rocks are hurled and molotov cocktails are thrown. She wants protests where property is destroyed and people are killed. She hopes that such moves will intimidate government at all levels in this nation into further forced redistribution of wealth.

As commenter Florida pointed out over at Althouse:

They [the leftists] want violence … as long as it’s THEIR violence.

As long as they are the ones bringing the thugs to the town hall meetings.

As long as they are the ones telling US what we must buy and who we can watch and what they can say.

That’s all they want.

Yeah, that’s all they want. Remember, Piven and her ilk are the kind who claim moral superiority to the rest of us. They arrogate to themselves the moral authority to regulate any aspect of our lives they choose. If we don’t cooperate with them, they are willing to intimidate us, hurt us, and kill us. The thought of a free society of equals is simply beyond their comprehension.

To the left, words in opposition to their cause are more violent than assault and murder in support of it. Never forget that.

With public attention focused on taxes, the deficit, gays in the military and nuclear arms reduction, little attention has been paid, so far, to the Tea Party’s most far-reaching move to remake American governance.

[...]

The proposal is sweeping, expressing with bold simplicity the view of the Tea Party and others that the federal government’s influence is far too broad. It would give state legislatures the power to veto any federal law or regulation if two-thirds of the legislatures approved.

The chances of the proposal becoming the Constitution’s 28th Amendment are exceedingly low. But it helps explain further the anger-fueled, myth-based politics of the populist new right. It also highlights the absence of a strong counterforce in American politics.

Well, so far, they haven’t strayed too far from the truth. Sure, they use the term “remake” where I would probably use “restore”, but the rest of the statement still stands. And, shock of shocks, the Times even gets the basic description of the Amendment right. But, alas, the truth quickly fades as the truthiness takes over.

What about those “anger-fueled, myth-based politics”? Well, the politics of limiting the Federal government are anger-filled, but this charge is leveled at us by the NYT to render our cause illegitimate. That’s where it rings false. We are angry because Washington is out of control. The list of abuses committed against freedom in the last twenty years needs no recitation here, but it culminated with a health-care reform law forced upon an American population that clearly and vociferously opposed it. Even today, job growth is stagnant in the face of a capricious and vengeful regulatory monster sitting on the banks of the Potomac ready to strike.

What about myth-based? The only things myth-based here is the notions of history held by the Times’ editorial board:

These flaws make the proposed amendment self-defeating, but they are far less significant than the mistaken vision of federalism on which it rests. Its foundation is that the United States defined in the Constitution are a set of decentralized sovereignties where personal responsibility, private property and a laissez-faire economy should reign. In this vision, the federal government is an intrusive parent.

The statement above is so ridiculous that any further ridicule from me would only distract you from its ridiculousness. I will, instead, only point out that if the New York Times’ editorial board not collectively slept through its eighth-grade civics classes, it would know that it just described the United States from its founding until the end of the Civil War.

Here, the NYT gets uncomfortably close to the truth, and so has to go scurrying back to the mythical founding of the United States it holds so dear:

The error that matters most here is about the Constitution’s history. America’s fundamental law holds competing elements, some constraining the national government, others energizing it. But the government the Constitution shaped was founded to create a sum greater than the parts, to promote economic development that would lift the fortunes of the American people.

The NYT board is deliberately ignoring the fact that the Barnett amendment, albeit crude, is a manifestation of the Founders’ belief that the States themselves should have representation in the Federal government. Before the 17th Amendment, it was the intent of the Constitution that the Senate represent the States, not the people (who were represented in the House). In reaction to the national trauma of the Civil War, the next half century featured a shift of power from the States to the Federal government.

The merits of the shift from a balance between the States and the Federal government to a dominant Federal government are open to debate, especially as we are seeing the faults of the dominant Federal government ever more clearly. However, the New York Times does not approach the issue from this reasonable position. Instead, they try to rewrite history to claim that it has always been this way.

This begs the question of why a once-august journalistic institution has devolved into a pathetic imitation of the Ministry of Truth. For that, we shall let the Times speak for itself:

In past economic crises, populist fervor has been for expanding the power of the national government to address America’s pressing needs. Pleas for making good the nation’s commitment to equality and welfare have been as loud as those for liberty. Now the many who are struggling have no progressive champion. The left have ceded the field to the Tea Party and, in doing so, allowed it to make history. It is building political power by selling the promise of a return to a mythic past.

This nation has always yearned for more government. Soon enough, they will be saying we have always been at war with Eastasia. Remember, the editorial board of the New York Times are siding with the government against you, and are making the truth a sacrificial lamb in the process.

“[Terrorists] are going to continue to probe the system and try to find a way through,” Napolitano said in an interview that aired Monday night on “Charlie Rose.”

“I think the tighter we get on aviation, we have to also be thinking now about going on to mass transit or to trains or maritime. So, what do we need to be doing to strengthen our protections there?”

Opponent’s of strip and grope are “domestic extremists”:

Following the publication of my article titled “Gate Rape of America,” I was contacted by a source within the DHS who is troubled by the terminology and content of an internal memo reportedly issued yesterday at the hand of DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Indeed, both the terminology and content contained in the document are troubling. The dissemination of the document itself is restricted by virtue of its classification, which prohibits any manner of public release. While the document cannot be posted or published, the more salient points are revealed here.

[...]

The terminology contained within the reported memo is indeed troubling. It labels any person who “interferes” with TSA airport security screening procedure protocol and operations by actively objecting to the established screening process, “including but not limited to the anticipated national opt-out day” as a “domestic extremist.” The label is then broadened to include “any person, group or alternative media source” that actively objects to, causes others to object to, supports and/or elicits support for anyone who engages in such travel disruptions at U.S. airports in response to the enhanced security procedures.

Fabulous, now I’m a domestic extremist. Well, as Barry Goldwater said: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” On second thought, when it comes to opposing an agency dedicated to controlling and intimidating American travelers, I will wear the extremist label with pride. Will you?

If that weren’t bad enough, the new procedures are ineffective. Dierdre Walker cuts right to heart of the matter with this statement:

We have unintentionally created an agency that now seeks efficiency and compliance more than any weapon or explosive.

Her story goes on to detail her own experience as a traveler whom the TSA believed would be compliant, and their reactions when she was not. She brings her experience as a law enforcement officer to play to assault the effectiveness of the TSA, and her piece is well worth a read. While starting from the same point as Ms. Walker, my line of reasoning ends up in a more loaded charge: The TSA deliberately puts control and intimidation ahead of security.

To back up this charge, let me start with the premise of the new “strip and grope” regime. As stated by the TSA, the procedure came into being after the Christmas underwear bombing plot. The theory, as stated, is that by having a machine that can see through passengers clothing the TSA can effectively prevent a replay of that attack. Those who refuse such machines must be manually searched. So, more correctly, the regime is “strip or grope”.

The problem is that “strip and grope” simply wouldn’t prevent the underwear bomb from getting on a plane again. The underwear bomb was made of PETN, which displays with almost no contrast to flesh on a backscatter X-ray. Looking at the design of the underwear bomb and comparing it to the images of PETN on a backscatter X-ray in this article by Drs. Leon Kaufman and Joseph Carlson leads me to believe that even had a screener looked carefully at the bomb being worn it would not have been detected.

That leads to the next question about the “strip or grope” regime: Does it encourage screeners to look carefully at each image? Consider the following problem already known to exist with X-ray screening of carry-on baggage, as stated by Bruce Schneier:

Airport screeners have a difficult job, primarily because the human brain isn’t naturally adapted to the task. We’re wired for visual pattern matching, and are great at picking out something we know to look for — for example, a lion in a sea of tall grass.

But we’re much less adept at detecting random exceptions in uniform data. Faced with an endless stream of identical objects, the brain quickly concludes that everything is identical and there’s no point in paying attention. By the time the exception comes around, the brain simply doesn’t notice it. This psychological phenomenon isn’t just a problem in airport screening: It’s been identified in inspections of all kinds, and is why casinos move their dealers around so often. The tasks are simply mind-numbing.

It is obvious from the above that having human screeners inspect images of every passenger coming through a TSA checkpoint is exactly the wrong way to implement backscatter X-ray or millimeter wave machines. There are a couple of ways to mitigate this issue from an effectiveness standpoint. First, use the machine only in cases where a specific threat is suspected. Second, use the machine on everyone, but have the computer flag images for further inspection by a human.

Neither of these options, however, gives the TSA the same ability to control and intimidate as using the machines to strip search every traveler. Given that the TSA has put steps in place to address the problem Schneier points out above in the baggage inspection process, it cannot be argued that they should not have known the same problem would exist when having all airline passengers pass through the strip search machines. The TSA knows how to do this in the way that maximizes security, but instead they chose to maximize control over passengers at the expense of security.

Don’t believe me? Let us now look at what happened when passenger Joe Sharkey opted out of the strip search machine at Chicago O’Hare Airport:

“Opt out! We got an opt out!” one bellowed about me in a tone that people in my desert neighborhood in Tucson usually reserve for declaring, “Rattlesnake!”

Other screeners took up the “Opt out!” shout. I was marched from the metal detector lane to one of those nearby whole-body imagers, ordered to take everything out of my pockets, remove my belt and hold my possessions up high. Then I was required to stand still while I received a rough pat-down by a man whose résumé, I suspected, included experience at a state prison.

“Hold your pants up!” he ordered me.

What part of this is TSA procedure and what part of it is over-enthusiastic screeners? We can be sure that the requirement that passengers receive “enhanced” pat-downs that include “meeting resistance” in the groin area are TSA procedure, because they have admitted as much. Additionally, I strongly believe that the public and attention-getting pronouncements when someone requests to opt-out are also TSA procedure since that part of the story is too consistent in incidents across the country. I also expect the TSA, and anyone defending them, to vociferously deny this. Everything else described in Sharkey’s experience I leave to a lack of professionalism displayed by the specifc TSA personnel he encountered.

However, without other screening, the hand searches would have been of questionable benefit of in the underwear bomber case. I personally have never handled PETN and cannot speculate as to what the underwear bomb may have felt like under the bomber’s clothing, so the following is speculation on my part: If the screener doing the hand inspection had stopped simply when resistance was felt in the bomber’s groin area, I doubt the explosive packet would have been detected. The packet was small and fairly flat, and contained in tight-fitting underwear.

More fundamentally, hand screening faces the same problem that the strip search machines do. When doing a high volume of searches, contraband that is not easily differentiated from the smuggler’s body or clothing (such as the underwear bomb above) will more easily evade detection. The only way to address this problem is for screeners to do fewer searches overall and only do searches where a specific threat is suspected.

Objects like knives and guns will easily be found in hand searches, but so will prostheses, insulin pumps, and ostomy bags. Screeners who are searching obviously non-threatening people with serious medical conditions are not searching people who are legitimate threats. As with any use of resources, there is an opportunity cost that must be considered.

By targeting every person who refuses to enter the strip search machine with public attention and a hand search that borders on sexual assault, the TSA is choosing control and intimidation over security.

To put security first, the TSA needs to realize that pre-”strip and grope” security procedures have actually proven effective at preventing terrorists from detonating bombs on aircraft. Yes, terrorists have repeatedly been able to get bomb components on aircraft. But no terrorist flying from a US airport in the past decade has managed to get the components of a bomb on to an aircraft in such a way that they have been successfully detonated. In addition, pre-”strip and grope” security procedures have proven effective in stopping airplane hijackings. When was the last time an aircraft was hijacked in the US? September 11, 2001.

The TSA should be continually evaluating which of their procedures are effectively preventing successful attacks, and pruning away those that aren’t. Instead, they respond by adding ever more restrictions that respond to yesterday’s attack, never considering the costs of what they’re doing. When designing the new restrictions, they put intimidation and control over efficacy.

Nine years after Richard Reid unsuccessfully attempted to take down an airliner with explosives in his shoe, we all must remove our shoes and have them X-rayed even though this has no provable benefit. Four years after a few extremists tried to sneak liquid bombs on to planes, millions of innocent beverages are confiscated every year even though technology exists that can “tell the difference between Pepsi and Coca-Cola“. Finally, and most egregiously, ten months after an al-Qaeda terrorist tried to detonate an underwear bomb, innocent Americans are subjected a search procedure designed to solely to humiliate and intimidate them.

As Sun Tzu observed about 2,500 years ago, “All warfare is based on deception.”

Then, the deception begins.

Here is her opening volley:

The highly charged partisan debate over the future of the Bush tax cuts (scheduled to expire at the end of December) is a kind of war. Whether you term it a class war depends on what you mean by class, but it is certainly a war between the very rich (the top 2 percent of income earners) and a host of other individuals allied with them, against everybody else who gives a darn.

Let’s look at what Folbre is really doing here. The situation today is that the top two percent of income earners are paying a certain tax rate. The Democrats in Congress and their left-wing allies are conspiring to make the top two percent of pay more in taxes. In the language of war, the Democrats launched an unprovoked attack on the top two percent of income earners. As far as I can tell, this is a war between rapacious government currently in the hands of government against the top two percent of income earners.

Look again at Folbre’s opener. Government is never mentioned. The true identity of the group being attacked is literally parenthetical, appended to the identity she wants us to apply to them. This group of the individuals has “a host of other individuals allied with them”, presumably too insignificant to be named. Finally, this group is presented as being the aggressors and attacking “everybody else who gives a darn”, i.e. all you good-hearted patriotic readers.

In one paragraph, the attacked become the attackers and the bystanders become the attacked. A good opening gambit from Professor Folbre. What does she have in store for us next?

Voters’ perceptions are not primarily driven by facts. A February CBS poll showed that only 12 percent of voters recognize that the Obama administration has cut taxes. About 24 percent of voters (and about 64 percent of Tea Party supporters) said they believed it had raised taxes.

The Democratic Congress has not changed income tax rates yet. The purported Obama tax cuts are actually tax credits, most linked with specific behavior. Let’s look at the situation for the average tax-paying American who is not engaging in one of the activities targeted by the Democratic Congress. The 2008 stimulus, passed by the previous Democratic Congress and signed into law by G.W. Bush provided all taxpayers with a $600 stimulus credit. The 2009 stimulus, passed by the current Democratic Congress and signed into law by Barack Obama provided all taxpayers with a $400 stimulus credit. In 2010, the $400 credit remains. For married households, each credit is doubled.

Neither Democratic Congress altered tax rates or brackets, with these remaining at the levels set by the Bush tax cuts. Therefore, Folbre’s assertion needs to be looked at carefully. Since there were no tax rate changes, it becomes clear that the tax cuts passed by the current Congress were entirely in the form of tax credits. For the majority of tax payers, who fall under the case outlined above, taxes have gone up under the current Congress and President.

If a tax credit is a tax cut, then decreasing or eliminating a tax credit must be tax increase. Arguing otherwise is pure deception. Folbre remains true to form on this one. Let’s see now how she attempts to rationalize the deception:

Many explanations come to mind. The tax issue is often a lightning rod for other frustrations. Most people find discussions of tax policy complicated and boring, and highly charged partisan debates excite some, but upset others, discouraging them from learning more.

The dynamics of collective conflict also come into play. Precisely because they are such a small group, the very rich stand to lose much more per person than others will gain per person from increased tax revenues. They also have more resources to invest in the fight, enabling them to make bigger contributions to Congressional campaigns.

She turns a poll in which the respondents were likely answering in a manner that was truthful to their own lives and attempts to use it to paint the picture that those saying their taxes have gone up are rubes under the sway of their monied intellectual overlords.

What’s up next? A ham-fisted attempt to link tax cuts to higher unemployment:

One important strategic goal of this camp is to persuade voters that tax increases at the top will hurt the economy as a whole. Here’s where supply-side economics comes in, with its claims that tax cuts increase revenues and promote economic growth.

Historical trends, including a comparison of trends during the Clinton and Bush administrations, do not support these claims.

Both Folbre and the Krugman analysis she links to ignore the actual drivers of the last two recessions: Economic bubbles fueled by an irresponsibly loose monetary policy. To be fair, this was not a sin of either the Democrats or Republicans alone, but rather a sin of the entire industry of big government. The 1990s had the tech boom and bust, while 2008 had the massive collapse of the housing bubble, both of which have the same root cause. From the charts Krugman uses, my only conclusion can be that the Bush tax cuts were, at worst, immaterial to the current economic crisis. More realistically, looking only at the data Krugman presents, the Bush tax cuts have played a small-to-medium role in limiting the rise of unemployment in the wake of the 2001-2002 recession and were contributing to a rise in GDP that was reversed by the passage and implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley.

To Krugman’s credit, he does not overextend the case made by the data he presents. This is a task Folbre takes upon herself. Not only does the data presented by Krugman not make the case Folbre says it does, the section from 1970 to 1990 makes the exact opposite case. The precipitous decline in unemployement after the 1981-1982 recession shows the very direct effect of the Reagan-era tax cuts. Moreover, the GDP change graph is actually designed to hide the massive spike in GDP growth after the Reagan-era tax cuts by starting immediately after the peak.

Here is Krugman’s first graph, this time displaying 1970-2010:

It appears Krugman was playing the “hide the decline” in reverse to make his point. Maybe this is where Folbre learned it from?

Next, Folbre again tries to distort the identity of the people being attacked by the Democratic Congress:

But in a world in which most people believe their livelihoods depend on rich investors, many people are fearful. As Brit Hume of Fox News put it on July 25, “When’s the last time one of these poor people offered you a job?”

The tax increase is being targeted at the top two percent of people who earn income. A super-rich investor who does not receive enough income in the current year to be in that top two percent will not be hit by these tax increases. But, realizing that she may be called on this, she actually acknowledges her opponents argument and then snarkily replies that raising taxes on the CEO of a big (politically-connected) business that paid surprisingly little in taxes just isn’t that bad for the economy.

Next, comes deception by omission:

Another strategic goal of opponents of the tax increase is to split and weaken the coalition favoring it. In this context, it is advantageous to label those receiving public assistance (including unemployment insurance) as slackers and cheats. About 47 percent of Americans owed no federal income tax in 2009, which you might think people opposed to federal income taxes would consider good news. Instead, the conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh characterized this as a form of fraud, “worse than anything Bernie Madoff ever thought about doing.”

What Folbre leaves out of this is the legitimate grievance that many of those who do not pay taxes are receiving tax money paid to the government by their fellow citizens. If the situation were different, i.e. the federal government only needed to tax the higher-income half of the population to support its limited operations, then maybe some taxpayers would be inclined to think of this as good news. Instead, taxpayers see an enormous beast that is taking from half of America, giving to the other half, and conjuring money out of thin air when it runs out of the real thing.

Thinking about it, Limbaugh’s quote is still hyperbole, if only because Madoff promised returns that were impossible. If he’d followed the IRS’ tact of just taking money and promising nothing, then it’d be a toss up.

Finally, let’s look at Folbre’s parting shot:

In my view, Citizens for Tax Justice, which describes itself as an advocacy group that strives “to give ordinary people a greater voice” against the “armies of special interest lobbyists for corporations and the wealthy,” offers the most specific and well-documented analysis of the two competing approaches to the Bush tax cuts, those of President Obama and the Congressional Republicans. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention from the news media

Her deception about the identity of the participants in the tax war cracks as she winds up for a big finish. She now acknowledges that Congressional Democrats are the attackers here, though she does it by saying that the other side is “resisting change”. This is as small a victory for truth as I have ever seen, but a victory nonetheless.

The Citizens for Tax Justice report is useful in that it lays out the figures behind the competing tax cut proposals. The rest is the same kind of incomplete analysis and outright deception put forth by Folbre, laid out for precisely the same purpose: to declare economic warfare on a class of citizen they feel deserves it. At the end of the day, all this energy is being directed towards rhetoric and deception to sell this simple, savage proposition: Take more from them and less from me.

These people remind me of the people who vociferously support a war but refuse to go fight in it. There were many of those in the Republican party when it came to Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were rightly branded “chickenhawks”. Folbre manages to write an entire article about taxing other people without once mentioning the word government or naming the IRS, instead only targeting the enemy and touting the purported benefits to “everybody else who gives a darn”. This is like the chickenhawk who writes a piece talking about the benefits of the Iraq war without once invoking the words violence or death. Violence happens in war, government happens in the tax war. The chickenhawks will admit neither.

Folbre is right, though, that there is a tax war and it is based on deception. The war is between a rapacious government and a host of tax chickenhawks allied with them, against everybody else. Remember that the battle being fought today is merely a skirmish in the economic war plans of the current ruling class. The real battles come when the government has its back against the fiscal wall and needs cash now. When that day comes, remember that Nancy Folbre and the other tax chickenhawks are not on your side.

It was a victory over ethics:

“When the deal goes down… All this talk about rules… we make ‘em up as we go along.”

It was a victory over the economy:

When Congress inevitably fails to implement the Obama plan’s spending cuts, and expands its subsidies to more and more people, the cost of this legislation will grow beyond $3 trillion. The CBO did an admirable job of projecting the cost of this legislation as written. But the text of the legislation does not reflect the reality it would create.

Most Democrats know that even though the projected cost is $1.2 trillion, they are setting in motion political forces that will guarantee even more government spending. The question is, do enough Democrats know it?

It was a victory over the Constitution:

Can Congress really require that every person purchase health insurance from a private company or face a penalty? The answer lies in the commerce clause of the Constitution, which grants Congress the power “to regulate commerce . . . among the several states.” Historically, insurance contracts were not considered commerce, which referred to trade and carriage of merchandise. That’s why insurance has traditionally been regulated by states. But the Supreme Court has long allowed Congress to regulate and prohibit all sorts of “economic” activities that are not, strictly speaking, commerce. The key is that those activities substantially affect interstate commerce, and that’s how the court would probably view the regulation of health insurance.

But the individual mandate extends the commerce clause’s power beyond economic activity, to economic inactivity. That is unprecedented. While Congress has used its taxing power to fund Social Security and Medicare, never before has it used its commerce power to mandate that an individual person engage in an economic transaction with a private company. Regulating the auto industry or paying “cash for clunkers” is one thing; making everyone buy a Chevy is quite another. Even during World War II, the federal government did not mandate that individual citizens purchase war bonds.

It was a victory over the People of the United States:

My health insurance policy, which is an actual “insurance” policy that insures me against catastrophic medical costs but leaves me with responsibility for day to day expenses, just became illegal. Over the last couple of years, I have documented my learning curve as, for the first time, I actually had an incentive to shop around for medical care, or to push back on doctors when I thought they are calling for too many tests and procedures. I have learned a lot about saving money, but all of this education is now for naught, as I will now be required to buy a pre-paid medical policy that leaves very little of the decision-making to my family and provides zero incentives for me to be cost conscious. Apparently, the operators of the US Postal Service and US military procurement felt they were better qualified to manage these cost/value trade-offs than I am.

Barack Obama says tonight was a “victory for the people”. As one of the people, I know no victory was won for me. A victory was won over me. I will have less money, less privacy, and less freedom under Obamacare than I had before, and I know who to blame.

I hope Obama, Pelosi, and Reid celebrate heartily this night, because they have made clear that they are the enemies of the People of the United States. With this bill, they will make us pay in ways we don’t fully yet understand. We will make them pay by taking from them the power they worked a lifetime to assume. It is our duty as freedom-loving Americans.